My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [87]
“Well, what do you carry?” I asked.
With his usual attention to detail, Dwayne cataloged an arsenal that would have given Travis Bickle the willies:
“… blackjack, throwing star, bolo, chain whip, nunchuks, pepper spray …” By the time he got to the gun he owned (some kind of pistol), it seemed almost like an afterthought, though firearm licenses in New York are hard to come by (obtaining a carry permit is next to impossible). If Dwayne had a gun it was almost certainly illegal, and as someone with a criminal record (I know that Dwayne went to jail when he was young, though I’ve never had the courage to ask what he did), he could do serious time. And we could get in a lot of trouble, too.
Personally, I hate guns. Not on principle, mind you, but out of fear. I’ve never gotten over the suspicion (planted in me by some after-school special, no doubt) that guns go off by themselves all the time and bullets ricochet off walls until they find a nice, innocent non-gun-owning victim’s forehead to land in.
So I told Dwayne to leave his weapons at home, which seemed to astonish him at first. Eventually, he relented. Of course, as I was soon to find out, Dwayne made up his own rules at the store, and unless I was going to frisk him every day, there was no way to stop him. Nevertheless, if he had a weapon inside his baggy overalls (or his mysteriously heavy backpack), he didn’t tell me. And sometimes I wondered if we were better off that way, with a sort of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gats and Glocks. There would be times, I would eventually realize, when maybe having a weapon around would not be a categorically awful thing. The pertinent question was whether it should be in the hands of anyone but Dwayne.
ONE THURSDAY AFTERNOON I’m sitting at my desk at the Review talking to Jack Kerouac’s lawyer in Boston when the line goes dead. Did I say something wrong? I wonder, staring at the receiver. We seemed to be having a perfectly friendly conversation. Why did Jack Kerouac’s lawyer hang up on me? Oh no, have I done it again?
Then I realize that all the computers in the office have also gone dead, and the air conditioner too, which was laboring to keep up with a ferocious heat wave. “Power outage,” someone says, though this being only two years after September 11, everyone is also acutely aware of that other possibility.
It’s hard to say which would be more frightening, I think, as I get up from my desk and move outside to the Seventy-second Street Esplanade, where crowds have gathered to see if anyone else knows what’s happening. The rumor is that it’s a blackout, although no one’s really sure. The last time New York had a citywide power outage, during the infamous Summer of Sam, arsonists and looters terrorized the city, and the power didn’t return for days. Here on the Upper East Side, probably the most target-rich neighborhood in the whole city, we’d be sitting ducks. Not in the least bit eager to find out what that’s like, the staff of the Review starts packing up and heading home.
“Nonsense!” George thunders, having come down from his office. “If the mobs come, we’ll invite them upstairs for a drink.” I can see it: as gangs of rampaging teenagers pound on the door of his townhouse, George leans out his window with a tumbler of Scotch, shouting, “Tally ho! Do you happen to have any ice?” The man simply has no fear (not to mention infinite good-natured trust).
George wants us to come up to his apartment and make ourselves comfortable, but I grab my backpack and wave good-bye. Not only do I want to be in a different neighborhood by nightfall; I want to make sure the deli is locked up and fortified as tightly as possible, to ward off looters for at least